If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Comment

It's not kept in a usable state. It's not even as stable as the Arch Linux testing repositories because it's treated as a staging ground.

Actually things have improved greatly over the past few years. Clearly, a lot depends on which desktop environment you are running. Gnome, from my experience, tends to be the most fragile, since they release a lot of unstable releases on the path to the next stable release, and they will all land in rawhide. Other environments, KDE for one, tend to only make releases towards the end of the development cycle, where things are really pretty stable. I've been running rawhide / KDE for the past three years or so, and only got bitten only once (because I missed an alert message on the fedora-devel list).

Comment

Actually things have improved greatly over the past few years. Clearly, a lot depends on which desktop environment you are running. Gnome, from my experience, tends to be the most fragile, since they release a lot of unstable releases on the path to the next stable release, and they will all land in rawhide. Other environments, KDE for one, tend to only make releases towards the end of the development cycle, where things are really pretty stable. I've been running rawhide / KDE for the past three years or so, and only got bitten only once (because I missed an alert message on the fedora-devel list).

Rawhide will often be tracking the development releases of the version that's eventually going to land in the stable release, so you're exposed to more upstream problems. Most projects still lack good test suites or don't do any testing at all, and the churn of the development branches/releases is painful. The Linux kernel is a pretty good example... hardware-specific regressions are common because it would be very hard to test everything, and it's nice to let other people find these for you in the earlier release candidates and first stable release .

Arch's testing repositories only get the latest stable release of GNOME and the kernel, with the first or second point release being the one moved to the stable repositories. Unstable releases are released a separate gnome-unstable repository. It's not an enormous difference, but I do run into far fewer issues in Arch compared to Debian Sid (probably due to heavy patching) and Rawhide.

Comment

Fedora rather needs something like the Arch User Repository. I always felt like software availability and discovery is especially bad on Fedora. Nobody wants to hunt down RPMs and RPM Fusion just dosen't cut it. I don't want to look in a thousand places to find my stuff. On Arch if it's not in place A (official repos) it's in place B (AUR) and it's nice centralized, searchable, you can leave comments, vote, get notified about future comments, super easy to contribute and install software from.